“I knew from the first time I saw Third Eye Blind play at the now-defunct Paradise Lounge in SoMa back in like 1996 that Stephan Jenkins possessed all the inherent and vitally intrinsic characteristics of a budding rock star,” says Aaron Axelsen, music director of San Francisco’s alternative rock radio station Live 105 (KITS).
Now it’s headlining amphitheaters across the country.
Last year, the group played on the main stage of Bonnaroo in Tennessee and the Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival in Golden Gate Park. They just heard a catchy tune and it resonates with them. “There’s this whole generation of kids who weren’t there for any of the processing, marketing - the videos I would look at and say, ‘Pull the plug, I never need to see it again,’” he says. “If you come to our show, you’re going to see kids who were not born when the first record came out,” says Jenkins. They didn’t know much about the backstory and heard the music on its own merits, embracing the big hooks, frantic riffs and Jenkins’ delightfully detailed wordplay.
THIRD EYE BLIND SF FREE
When one iteration of Third Eye Blind performed a free show in the middle of San Francisco’s Union Square in 2010, there were more pigeons than people watching the band at the lunchtime concert.īut at some point a new legion of fans discovered the band.
THIRD EYE BLIND SF SERIES
The intervening years have been marked by a series of hiatuses and intermittent releases - 2003’s “Out of the Vein,” 2009’s “Ursa Major” and 2015’s “Dopamine.” The latter two were released on the group’s own Mega Collider label. On its current tour, only drummer Brad Hargreaves remains from the original lineup. The quick fame, combined with Jenkins’ alpha male posturing, splintered the band, and by the time it put out its second album, 1999’s “Blue,” the insults and lawsuits were flying. (Photo by Brett Coomer/Special to the Chronicle) HOUCHRON CAPTION (): Lead singer Stephan Jenkins displays some charismatic cockiness during Third Eye Blind's concert in The Woodlands. It was hard for me to have good manners.” SPECIAL TO THE CHRONICLE-Third Eye Blind lead singer Stephen Jenkins performs during the group's concert at the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion Friday, Oct. “I’ve always been a punk, and I felt like I was being put in somebody else’s fractal and that pissed me. “I had been working my whole life to get out of institutions and not ask people for permission,” he says.
He was unapologetically cocky, with people in San Francisco’s cloistered ’90s music scene in particular bristling at his take-no-prisoners level of ambition - a byproduct, he says, of growing up in a broken home, being diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome just before the band took off and watching other local bands lap Third Eye Blind early on. Jenkins dated the actress Charlize Theron, befriended Winona Ryder feuded with members of Green Day, Pearl Jam and Matchbox 20 and rode around town with his dog on a Triumph motorcycle. Third Eye Blind opened shows for U2 and the Rolling Stones. It spawned five hit singles with “Semi-Charmed Life” (possibly the catchiest song about casual sex and meth addiction ever), “Graduate,” “How’s It Going to Be,” “Jumper” (a song about suicide) and “Losing a Whole Year.” The album sold more than 6 million copies and spent 106 weeks on the Billboard chart.